Saturday, February 13, 2016

Famed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has recently published a
book called Unforbidden Pleasures. In
it he bemoans the fact that we no longer feel pleasure in the ordinary
experiences of everyday life. We only feel pleasure when we are engaged in an
extreme activity, one that we think of as evil and wicked.

Have we
lost the art of drawing pleasure from the ordinary things in life? Adam
Phillips believes so. Long after organised religion and its Thou Shalt Nots
have receded from most minds, he argues we remain imprisoned by a notion that
something can only be pleasurable if it is wicked.

He is
right that the consumer culture in which we are all immersed plays endlessly
with the perception that something can only be enjoyable if it is sinful or
"indulgent", which all hints at the same thing: it can only be good
if it's bad.

Despite
the modern cult of health, purification and cleansing, a conviction endures
that a life lived in full must be lived in the fast lane and to excess. We may
have no intention of following Judy Garland or Edith Piaf, but at some level we
admire them for going out with a bang, not a whimper. As Phillips puts it, we
are in thrall to the idea that "the risk-taking, the transgressive are by
definition having a better time". By contrast, unforbidden pleasures are
viewed as "sad substitutes for forbidden ones".

One is tempted to say: speak for yourself, Adam…. It is far from self-evident that we only
believe that we can gain pleasure by indulging in wickedness. Any more than we
believe that we can only desire something that is forbidden.

Phillips is analyzing the culture, and such analyses, with
the generalizations we can easily draw from them, must be greeted with great
skepticism. Usually, they mask an ideological agenda.

It would be more accurate to say that Phillips is describing a default tactic employed
by people who are depressed. The more you become desensitized the more you need extra stimulus to experience anything at all. Perhaps he is arguing that they would do better to
undergo psychoanalysis… though psychoanalysis, in the traditional Freudian sense, is useless as a treatment of depression.

Or else, he might be arguing that when we analyze our propensity for wicked pleasures, we will naturally
learn to enjoy more everyday pleasures. And, since Phillips does not offer any concrete steps that we might take to feel more everyday pleasures, he is left with the standard psychoanalytic remedy: enhanced consciousness.

Phillips seems to enjoy trafficking in bits and
pieces of Freudian pseudo-wisdom, so we will allow him his unforbidden pleasure.
And yet, strangely enough, the chronically depressed Freud did not leave very
much place for unforbidden pleasures in his own fictional world. When it came to treating his own depression, Freud made use of one of the most important chemical anti-depressants: nicotine.

Freud’s was a world of dramatized experience. We underscore the fact that the word for pleasure in his pleasure principle was the German “Lust.”
As you can easily guess Lust has
traditionally been a forbidden pleasure. Thus, Freud must be counted as one of
the creators of the kinds of beings who can only feel pleasure when it is
involves an extreme and wicked experience.

Phillips is a true believing Freudian, but he is also lazy.
By his admission he only writes for one day a week. In many ways this explains
the problem. If you knew a concert pianist who only practiced one day a week,
how well do you think that he would play? Would you want to go see him perform
in concert?

Writing in the Guardian Anthony Cummins summarizes a couple
of Phillips’s emptier thoughts:

Phillips
says addiction “is always the ongoing attempt to survive what was experienced
as malign mothering” and that “all tragedies are tragedies of obedience”.

This is silliness. When someone is prescribed an opioid to
manage pain and becomes addicted to it, he is not enacting his prior experience with his malign
mother. We know that those who are psychoanalytically inclined have such an
affinity for blaming things on mothers. And we also know that they, as Phillips
demonstrates, pretend to explain all of human experience by wrapping it in
a Freudian narrative.

But, Phillips does not say that the mother was a witch, only
that she was experienced as a witch. But, how do you know? Why, by the fact
that you became an addict.

Like all good Freudians Phillips excels at circular reasoning. Like all good Freudians he suffers from an Ouroborous Complex. He also excels at producing narrative fictions that can neither be tested nor demonstrated.
Yet, no one has ever been cured of an addiction or has learned how to control
his addiction by discovering that his mother was a cold, heartless witch. No
sensible therapist would even suggest such a thing.

As for tragedy, Aristotle once remarked that all tragedy
involves hybris—powerful people brought down by arrogance. You might say that
tragic heroes disobey the gods or obey the wrong gods, but isn’t that a sign of
arrogance?

As it happens, obedience is normally considered a good thing. An army where
no one follows orders is not going to be very effective. But, disobedience does
not a tragedy make. A disobedient child or a child who is conflicted about which
rules to follow is not a tragic hero.

Former psychoanalyst Salley Vickers explains the Phillips vision in The New
Statesman. In the end, it’s warmed over Freudianism:

Much of
our behaviour is at the behest of an inner censor, absorbed through our
upbringing, whose influence is at best restrictive – a cruel clipper of wings –
and at worst murderous. Guilt, Phillips wants to persuade us, is often the
fearful reaction to this internalised tyrant’s disapproval, rather than a
result of honest remorse. With the terrible phrase “to be ashamed of yourself”,
it is worth asking, Phillips suggests, what made the self of whom one is
enjoined to be ashamed.

Note the drama: censorship and murder. Pick your poison. A
Freudian might want to believe that much of our behavior is being produced by a
censor, but, if you think about it, censorship and threats can only tell you what not to
do. They do not prescribe socially appropriate behaviors. In truth, there is no
way of generating customary behaviors like table manners from a series of
taboos… rules that tell you what not to do.

Besides, people enjoy learning how to do things the right
way… whether it involves good table manners or learning how to converse.

In the paragraph quoted, Phillips does not seem to
understand the difference between shame and guilt, but I have written about it
often enough already. If he or anyone else wants to learn about it they can
read my book on Saving Face or my
book The Last Psychoanalyst.

The latter work contains my reading of Hamlet, so I will not
repeat it here.

Vickers summarizes the Phillips reading:

Freud
appears never to have questioned the call to revenge that Hamlet buckles under.
He perceives Hamlet’s procrastination and ensuing self-criticism as no more
than the displacement of violence towards his murdering uncle, never
considering that Hamlet’s “conscience” may also be a disinclination to obey a
dead father’s demand. If, as Hamlet suggests, “The play’s the thing/Wherein
I’ll catch the conscience of the king,” it may well be, as Phillips speculates,
that he is attempting to hunt down and bag Claudius’s shabby morality in order
to expose it on a public stage. But it may also be an attempt to engage
Claudius in a more creative conversation through play (or, to be specific, a play – for Hamlet, as well as
being an artist’s protégé, is an artist).

Surely, it is possible that Hamlet wants to expose Claudius
in public. I mentioned it in The Last
Psychoanalyst. Since I have not read the Phillips book, I do not know
whether he gave me credit for the idea… but I will assume, for the sake of
propriety, that he did.

As for the notion of engaging Claudius in a more creative
conversation through play, here Phillips gets confused. A play, as dramatic
presentation is not the same thing as play, as what one does in a game. Just
because the word is the same that does not mean that the concept is the same.
Phillips should know better than to introduce such confusion.

More importantly, Phillips is exposing the dark underside of
psychoanalysis. Consider this: psychoanalysis is presumably used to treat mental
distress. Among the principal mental defects is depression. Among the salient
characteristics of depression are a loss of appetite, a loss of sexual desire
and an inability to experience pleasure. Psychiatry calls the latter anhedonia.

Freudian psychoanalysis cannot treat or cure any of the
above because it does not have the conceptual tools to do so. It treats the loss of desire by teaching patients to manufacture an
artificial desire for forbidden objects and people…
thereafter to teach patients that in order to find their spouses desirable they
must see them as forbidden.

As for anhedonia, Phillips derides the notion that someone
who is depressed should try to find pleasure by engaging in self-indulgent and
decadent actions. And yet, that is the only solution that Freudian theory
really admits of. You can blame it all on consumer culture, but Freudian theory
and the therapy culture has certainly contributed mightily to the problem

In truth, when people are cured of their depression, they
recover their desire, their appetite and their capacity to experience pleasure.
It does not happen because they have learned how to fold their experience and
their life history into a Freudian narrative that pretends to explain
everything as a function of bad mothering. It happens when they recover their
pride, their self-respect and their confidence. Sometimes this occurs through
processes involving cognitive therapy. At other times, it requires coaching.

You
cannot overcome depression by becoming more conscious of your consciousness.
Phillips understands that the word “conscience” also means consciousness, but
he does not seem to understand that trying to cure depression by getting more
involved with your mind will, as Hamlet said, make you a coward and render you
inactive. You cannot gain a better sense of your own value by lacking courage
and being unable to function.

6 comments:

Anthony Cummins: Phillips says addiction “is always the ongoing attempt to survive what was experienced as malign mothering”.Stuart: This is silliness. When someone is prescribed an opioid to manage pain and becomes addicted to it, he is not enacting his prior experience with his malign mother.

Giving some credit, I would assume when Phillips says "addiction" he means "psychological addiction" rather than "physical addition." He's looking more at vulnerabilities to addiction.

And even in drug addiction there seems to be good evidence that physical addiction is a minor component. Like the old story of the rats in a cage consuming cocaine until death, but later experiments showed the rats ignored the cocaine if they had a more interesting environment.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html

Of course that suggests if we collectively live in a hyperstimulated environment (and we do), that drug usage should be reduced, and perhaps that's true, although in the sense of cocaine, apparently many "high functioning" people can go years on cocaine to drive their moods to ever greater heights of grandiosity, at least as long as it works.

Stuart: It would be more accurate to say that Phillips is describing a default tactic employed by people who are depressed. The more you become desensitized the more you need extra stimulus to experience anything at all.

Depression is another one of those confusing words that can seem to mean different things. Unless the same depression that makes some people apathetic and unable to get out of bed or even make breakfast is the SAME depression that makes others into hyperactive work-aholics, moving into frantic action, to avoid uncomfortable thoughts. Perhaps they are for all I know.

Maybe it really all is different tactics? I would assume the primary cause of depression is a lack of feeling of agency, which is why women may experience more depression than men, more often putting themselves, or being required by others to be in dependent positions, and unable to risk expressing themselves honestly.

Or I expect psychologists would simply call this the ego's battle between the id and superego. The id monitors inner needs, and the superego outer needs, and if either becomes dominent, the other becomes "depressed", and causes indirect problems, whether acting out, or a bad conscience.

And in that sense, I do see consciousness as a solution. You need a way to represent the tension of contradictory needs, and see which needs you have raised as important, and which you have dismissed as unimportant, and find ways to express the unimportant ones and that process opens a new inner dialogue.

The connection of "pleasure" and "wickedness" for that matter is primarily Christian I think. All you have to do is look at the 7 deadly sins.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_virtues

You would think pychology would be more interested in the religious solutions to these human predicaments. On the other hand, probably for every religious success story to raise the human spirit, there's another tragic story, where people become fundamentalistic, and replace reality with an oppressive model that fail to contain what life demands of us.

And apparently Phillips agrees psychology isn't a science, but a set of narratives like all the others - that can enable participation in the living world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Phillips_(psychologist)#Literary_presenceHe is deeply opposed to any attempt to defend psychoanalysis as a science or even as a field of academic study, rather than simply, as he puts it, "a set of stories about how we can nourish ourselves to keep faith with our belief in nourishment, our desire for desire stories [that] will sustain our appetite, which is, by definition, our appetite for life."

Speaking only for myself, I say he is wrong--in my case. I know a number of others who seem to resemble me in that regard. On the other hand, he'd never get published if he said we're all pretty normal.

Whoever believes in serendipity, raise your hand. Or your consciousness. Whatever.Anyway, I saw the following cartoon on PowerLine just before I read this post.http://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2016/02/Psycho-rapist.jpg

Stuart, I don't think I mentioned the word psychoanalysis, except quoting wikipedia bio where Phillips appears to agree with you, that it is NOT a science.

p.s. On the "Psycho the rapist" comic, the original comic said "The Rapist", but I don't know the date on that. There's a scribbling signature there I can't read, and it was removed in the new copy. It does look like the style seen in the New Yorker.https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/e9/3d/a5/e93da5962b9f44449f20dc18fd6e06bb.jpg

Also, perhaps this is the "missing link" comic from 3 months ago, adding "psycho" but keeping the original quote "It's one word George!"http://randomoverload.org/its-one-word-george

Perhaps adding "psycho" in front is an effort to save therapy, while dismissing Freud?

I find your comments very smug. It would be so much better if you would grapple with the ideas instead of take Mr. Phillips comments out of context and set up straw man arguments. His article was blunt and not particularly nuanced, leaving it open to many of the inferences you draw, which you seem to do with contemptuous glee. If you read more closely his article was somewhat an indictment of Fraud not a slavish reiteration.